IV. We have spoken of a fever still more intense
even than this, severe as it is, under the name of the intensest form of fever. And of this, the same may be said as was stated of the mildest, that there is little or nothing to be done. As far as regards the treatment, the two extremes of fever, the mildest and the most intense, meet, for in the first no remedies are required, and in the second, none are of any avail. In these latter cases, there is no remedy and no combination of remedies yet known, capable of affording effectual aid. The abstraction of the smallest quantity of blood is fatal: the application of the cold bath is out of the question; the warm bath is inert; the vapour-bath affords rather more prospect of benefit; but the proper remedies, if any exist, remain to be discovered.
When a person has swallowed a certain quantity of laudanum, there are remedies which are capable of counteracting the poison and of saving the patient. When he has swallowed a larger dose, provided it amount to a certain quantity, no remedies will avail, excepting the application of the stomach-pump. Unless the poison be promptly expelled from the system, adopt with the utmost vigour the best-concerted expedients which the medical art can supply, the patient will die. A person afflicted with the intensest form of fever, is in the condition of a person who has swallowed this large dose of poison. When a pump is invented, capable of extracting his poison from the brain, he may be saved.